Search engines keep lawyers up at night.
The search engine bots themselves scour the Net monthly/weekly/daily/by the minute, looking for new content and trying to avoid SEO experts' honeypots and deadfall booby traps (see Anthony Hopkins in The Edge for more -- and also see how bandwidth leeching works...). Sometimes, engines inadvertently index stuff that a site owner wants to keep behind a form, hidden, sacrosanct, accessible only with a $24.99-a-month subscription.
Now, Amazon and Google have been sued for indexing adult entertainment site Perfect 10’s images and serving up the links to this content. Potential Perfect 10 customers (no Bo Derek reference intended) have been using Amazon’s Google-powered A9.com to get a free peek. For shame. The household brands were informed that they were essentially leeching bandwidth (and “potential“ fees, fees, fees) from poor Perfect 10 and yet have done nothing, so the lawyers are on the case (read more).
Only in America.
Maybe there is a future for LinkDeny after all. The adult entertainment industry is usually at the forefront of commercial Web developments (pun intended), so watch this case to see the evolution of the legality of bandwidth leeching in the future.
And take a look at your referrers and who is downloading what from your site. You may be surprised to find a GIF, MPEG or PDF that you dutifully serve is making someone else’s bottom line very green indeed…